Ultimate Sacrifice for Love
by ninfamaniac
Summary: She made the ultimate sacrifice for love, for life, but where does that leave him? (Complete)


**Ultimate Sacrifice for Love**  
  
by **ninfa-maniac (on fanfiction.net)** / **-ninfa (on livejournal.com)**  
  
**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.  
  
**Summary:** She made the ultimate sacrifice for love, for life, but where does that leave him?  
  
**Pairings:** Harry/Hermione  
  
**Categories:** Tragedy, Romance  
  
**Notes:** One of my favorite fics I've ever written, penned after a very bad day. Slightly tweaked from the first time I posted. Please review! (I am currently looking for a beta... Anyone interested can email me at purpleduckies at comcast dot net.)  
  
**Warning:** This fic contains death and adult language.  
  
-----  
  
He lay on his four-poster bed near the top of Gryffindor tower, trying to figure out just what had happened. His love was gone now, and he felt so utterly lost and alone.  
  
She was his true love; he knew this. They had met on the train, and slowly, but surely, after many years, admitted their love. Now, the love that surrounded him for the better part of seven years was gone. Everything he thought he knew was gone.  
  
Harry didn't care about anything else when she was around. Nothing else mattered. It was just the two of them; no one else existed.  
  
It seemed that everything he could think of reminded him of his her. The bed, the scent in the air, the whole fucking building reminded him of a love that was no longer near. He couldn't do a thing to get her out of his head.  
  
'Damn Voldermort. If it wasn't for who I was, this would've never happened. This is all my fault. My fault for being born who I was.'  
  
"How many more have to die?" she asked him, trying to wrench her arm out of his grasp only weeks ago. "I know I'm not the one who is destined to end this rein of terror. You are, Harry. Only you. I won't let you stay in hiding forever with me. I won't let myself stand in your way. I love you with all of my heart, but you need to end this."  
  
"I know, Hermione. But I love you. I don't want you to leave me."  
  
"You have to end this. I can feel it."  
  
He grabbed her hand, squeezing it tightly. "Don't leave me."  
  
A single tear dropped from her honey-colored eyes, and she nodded to him as she bit her lip. She hugged him one last time, a slight kiss on the mouth that felt like a feather, and then she ran to the door without turning around.  
  
Lying on that bed weeks later, he knew she was right. But she could have stayed, couldn't she? But no, the best thing in his life, his strength, the one that gave him meaning, had left him. His life was full of sadness, and he was to destroy the most powerful wizard anyone had seen in a since the height of Dumbledore's powers.  
  
What had he done to deserve being left? Nothing. Again, his life was fucked up by some stupid fucking scar on his fucking head. If he had just died, Voldermort or himself, that late October night so many years ago, this pain would not be in the world. But no. He was marked to live the 'hero's life.' He never wanted a hero's life. He wanted his life, with his parents, with her, and he wanted it to end like the faerie tales he had overheard as a child told to Dudley, with those three magical words. "Happily ever after." That's all he wanted, but then some old bat made a prophecy, and his world was doomed before it even began.  
  
Harry got up from the bed after wiping a few small tears away with his shirtsleeve. He walked down the stairs to the common room, and found the wall full of photographs Colin had added since the years they'd been there. Harry gazed at his favorite picture of her, hair blowing in the wind, her clothes hugging her in all the right places. The wizard picture blew him a kiss, and since no one else was there for the winter break, he blew one right back.  
  
She was right. Of course, when was she wrong? He had to stop the killing. Ron had died only last year. Only Fred survived the attack on the Burrow a few days after Ron's funeral. Fred stayed in St. Mungo's until Death Eaters destroyed it half a year later. Sirius was gone behind the veil, and Lupin had gone back to the Department of Mysteries a year after his lover died and joined him in life beyond. Cho Chang, Justin Finch- Fletchley, Seamus Finnigan, Dean Thomas, and many more had been killed by a Death Eater attack on Platform 9 3/4 before Cho's final year. Snape was in hiding, but many of the other Hogwarts professors had been killed, including Headmaster Dumbledore. Last he heard, Draco Malfoy was in hiding because he refused to become a Death Eater like his idiot goons, Crabbe and Goyle. Voldermort had killed so many people, and Harry was positive no one would be returning to Hogwarts out of fear.  
  
'If anything, I'll do it for her,' he thought to himself.  
  
He paused, concentrating on all the pictures of his friends. Harry tried to remember the good times with them, but since the Dark Lord regained his power, there was no way that he could. The happy times of Quidditch and butterbeer were long gone, paved over by fear and death.  
  
He was standing there, with the past few years and months flying by in his head, when the Gryffindor common room exploded, as if by some sort of Muggle bomb. Bricks flew everywhere, bits of plaster and dust in the air. Between the flying particles, he made out a tall man, with haunting, yellow eyes, slits for nostrils, and his clammy, long fingers around a longer wand, and a sinister smile.  
  
Harry raised his wand, and pointed it at Voldermort.  
  
"Secare fauces!" he cried, and he began to see a line forming at the Dark Lord's neck, slowly creeping, and cutting deeper, like a knife against his horrid throat.  
  
Voldermort's eyes drew together, as though he were wincing in pain; Harry was unaware Voldermort was human enough to feel pain. He managed to mutter "Finite Incantantum," and stared deep into the young man's emerald green eyes. The old man bellowed to him, "I killed your little girlfriend, Potter. What was her name? Hermione? She's gone, like the rest of your grimy little friends. No one is left to save you now. I don't see your mother protecting you." Voldermort looked at Harry again, Harry's mouth open in disbelief and anger rising in his throat. "You really loved that little bitch? Pity she died, really. She kept telling me that I would never defeat you. That I would never win." Voldermort's mouth twisted into an evil grin.  
  
"But now I have little Harry Potter right where I want him." He chanted, in almost a singsong voice. "All alone, in his Hogwarts common room; nowhere to run, nowhere to hide."  
  
"No! You didn't kill her!" He had finally found his voice. Voldermort smiled again and nodded. "She can't be... Hermione is still alive. She has to be," Harry muttered to himself in disbelief. Harry pointed his wand again at Voldermort, while he was cackling evilly. He remembered the Department of Mysteries in his fifth year, Bellatrix Lestrange telling him that righteous anger won't do it; he had to mean it, to enjoy causing pain... Harry knew he meant the more than almost anything.  
  
"AVADA KENDAVRA!"  
  
Bright, green light surrounded the Dark Lord. He opened his eyes, and the same light shot out. He mouthed words, but it was as if someone cast a Silencing Charm on him. The green light emitted from his open mouth. Voldermort was lifted into the air of the common room, surrounded by so much light that Harry had to cover his eyes.  
  
When Harry looked up, the Dark Lord's body had fallen to the floor; the one wizard who had been torturing so many for such a long time was dead.  
  
Harry's knees buckled under him, and he collapsed to the floor, weeping freely. He stayed there, wishing he was dead too. He wanted to be with Hermione, his friends, and his parents. Harry lay there, pleading for all the people he loved to come back to him in this world.  
  
He stood up after almost two hours of crying and stumbled to the late Headmaster's office. He quickly found the Sorting Hat that had saved him in his second year. "Please, help me like you did last time."  
  
The brim opened slightly, and the heartbroken young man heard, "As you wish."  
  
Harry pulled out Godric Gryffindor's knife, twirling it slightly.  
  
"O, happy dagger! This is thy sheath. There rust and let me die."  
  
Harry plunged the knife deep into his heart, and mumbled the words "I love you, Hermione," before collapsing onto the floor of Dumbledore's office.  
  
"I love you, Hermi..."  
  
His emerald eyes closed for the last time.  
  
-end- 


End file.
